Topic 81: The Grateful Dead Reader

Leading the conversation with our next guests is Mary Eisenhart - marye,
here on the WELL - a writer, editor, long-time Deadhead and WELL
member, one of the co-founders of the WELL's Grateful Dead conference and
herself a contributor to The Grateful Dead Reader.
Mary introduces her guests and co-contributors:
Our guests are David Dodd and Diana Spaulding, a husband-and-wife
team of librarians responsible for a multi-year labor of love now
published by Oxford University Press as The Grateful Dead Reader.
In the GD Reader, David and Diana have collected articles,
interviews, poems and writings that defy easy classification, all
chronicling the Grateful Dead and Deadhead culture from the band's
beginnings in 1965 to the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995. Authors
range from Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, Tom Wolfe and the late Ralph
J. Gleason (essentially the first music critic to take rock as a
serious art form) to obscure dudes who wrote articles for obscure
publications and then vanished.
Among the contributors to the book are a number of Well folks,
including David Gans (tnf), Steve Silberman (digaman), Gary Burnett
(jera), and me (marye), the Interviewer of Record here. We've already
been having fun hanging out on David's show on KPFA and at the July
25 reading/booksigning at the Booksmith on Haight St., and as we join
our esteemed editor in this forum we hope to continue the questions,
answers, storytelling and good times that are off to such a good
start in the physical world.

Okay, Mary! (Firstly, though, as librarians, we must insist that nothing
defies classification!)
Back in 1997, David was the co-author of a very serious and academic work
entitled *The Grateful Dead and the Deadheads: An Annotated Bibliography,*
with Robert Weiner. We tried our very best to track down every book,
chapter, article, and fan magazine ever written about the band, read it all,
and then annotate and cross-reference the whole thing. It was quite an
experience, and included a trip to the Dead's offices where Eileen Law and
Alan Trist gave us access to a lot of material from the band's archives. We
felt, when the book was published (Greenwood Pr., 1997), that it represented
a fairly complete picture of the state of the literature on the band, and at
least that it would be a good starting point for future scholarship. It
retailed for a whopping $75, and we think Greenwood sold about 700 copies,
which, for a bibliography, and at that price, is pretty ding-dang good
(possibly the best-selling rock bibliography of all time).
So there sat David, having read all this stuff, and being also in the midst
of the creation of a web site about the Grateful Dead's original lyrics, The
Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, and the next idea to spring to mind was that
perhaps the web site could be a printed book. Oxford University Press was
interested, but securing the permission from the band proved beyond us--it's
on a very long-term back burner. Oxford suggested that David might like to
compile an anthology of writing about the band, in their "Readers on
American Musicians" series, which up to then included the Duke Ellington
Reader and the Frank Sinatra Reader. This sounded like a reasonable project
(little did we know), so we said sure! David looked around for a co-editor,
and although a couple of folks were interested, no one really had the time
to spare right then. But Diana thought it might be a good way to have an
opportunity to work with David (weird writing about ourselves in the third
person--perhaps in future posts we could identify ourselves and just use
"I"), and she came on board as co-editor.
As the project took on a general form it became clear that the largest task,
after selecting the pieces to be included (which David initially did,
resulting in a 700 page plus book), would be securing the necessary
permissions. With Oxford, this is the responsibility of the author, both
clerically and monetarily speaking. Fortunately, David Gans introduced us to
his agent, Sandy Choron, who is now our agent, too, and who did a good job
keeping us on track financially. Diana took on the job of securing
permissions when followup and research was required, and we worked from a
budget of what we could afford if we paid everyone roughly the same amount
for their contributions. Of course, some cost more, but fortunately some
writers waived their fees altogether (a great kindness), and we were able to
put together a pretty good table of contents.
We need to take a break now, but we'll write more about the whole process
very soon!
Thanks for inviting us onto the Inwell conference.

Diana here--I don't have a well account of my own so I'll be sharing the
"ddodd" address. I don't think David mentioned that fact that I'm not a
deadhead (boo, hiss, I know...). It was an honor to share David'd labor of
love, truly. Securing the permissions involved a lot of phone calls, and we
struck out in finding a couple of authors. One day we took a drive into the
Santa Cruz mountains and put a letter in the mailbox at the last known
address of William Craddock. He happily agreed to have his work reprinted
and expressed some surprise that we were able to find him. Turns out he
hadn't lived in that house in over 10 years but the owners were friends who
passed the letter on to him. We're very pleased with how the book turned out
as a cooperative venture for us and as a literary accomplishment, too.

And, aside from the work of people likely to participate in this
discussion, could you tell us about some of the selections in the
book and why you like 'em?
For example, I find that many post-boomers have no idea who
Ralph J. Gleason was.
And who is this Craddock guy anyhow?

The question of criteria for selection is an intricate one, as you might
imagine. As I noted above, my initial table of contents would have resulted
in a much larger book. It would have included enough interviews with various
band members to make this a less Garcia-Hunter centric book. And it would
have been arranged thematically, rather than chronologically. There would
have been a section on band members, on the deadheads, on the music, on the
lyrics, and on the tradition fostered by the band (as in the carrying on of
the torch by bands such as Phish, Blues Traveler, etc.). There would have
been some actual song lyrics. Barlow would have been in there, which he
hardly is!
But Oxford, thankfully, has quite a process for review pre-writing of the
books they intend to publish, and this includes sending out the prospectus
of the book to experts, which in this case included Blair Jackson, who made
a number of very well-taken comments about the book, and who advocated
leaving out quite a few things and structuring it differently. We took his
advice. And Oxford told me that although the Duke Ellington Reader was over
700 pages, that was an exception, and they would prefer something more along
the lines of 300 pages for this one.
Even so, some pieces of inarguable quality were never on the list. Our
criteria from the get-go included the principle that we not republish
material readily available elsewhere. That meant leaving out all of the
Rolling Stone material (some of which is pretty much essential reading) with
the exception of one piece by Ralph Gleason (who was, incidentally, the co-
founder of Rolling Stone, along with Jann Wenner). It also meant that we
would leave out most work by Blair Jackson and David Gans, each of whom have
their own anthologies!
An overarching principle, and one that I can only hope was successfully
implemented, was that we wanted to emphasize good writing, rather than
merely informative content. So we wind up with pieces such as Philip
Baruth's first chapter from The Millennium Shows, which is atmospheric, non-
factual in the extreme, and frankly weird, but utterly appropriate to the
anthology. And William Craddock's piece, excerpted from the chapter entitled
"Morgan's Acid Test" in his 1972 book *Be Not Content*, a classic of hippie
writing, is also more valuable for its evocative writing than for its
information. (Perhaps there is, though, an evocative means of imparting
information: as in poetry.) And speaking of poetry, we include a poem from
the Dead Heads Newsletter by Hunter, rather than any of his lyrics (which
are available in many places but especially in his *A Box of Rain*).
Besides the Garcia-Hunter centricity, we also have received from editors and
earlier reviewers a frequent, if not complaint, then at least recognition
that the book's contributors are male in the overwhelming majority. Mary,
Alice Kahn, and two photographers are the only female contributors. (Mary
Ann Mayer and Susana Millman are the photographers.) We had, initially, two
more pieces by women in the book: Ingrid Sischy's wonderful piece on the
death of Garcia and the Dead's redefintion of "family"; and Liza Williams's
early piece about a Winterland New Year's show that appeared in an
underground paper from LA. We couldn't afford Sischy's permission fee, and
we couldn't find Ms. Williams, though we tried for months. She had published
an anthology of her writing back in the 70's, but the publisher had no ideas
where she was, and none of the contacts from the LA newspaper scene could
point us to her. And there are WAY too many women with that name or
variations thereof living throughout the USA. So we gave up, regretfully, on
that piece. I would welcome any theories about why it is that men seem more
prolific in the rock journalism field generally!

Heh.
I dunno if we should go there.:-)
I mean, I'm not sure I'm surprised about the male dominance of
rock journalism overall, seeing as both the artists and the audiences
are still mostly male and the whole lifestyle often seems notably
testosterone-driven. (And allow me to point out at this juncture,
since I copy-edit her stuff with joy, that there is a Gurl Writer
at Sonicnet.com by the name of Bliss Bowen who writes about
folk-blues and is very, very good.)
But for the Dead and Deadheads I had more enlightened expectations.:-)
My bias in this is that I was so dumbstruck by the Dead and by Garcia
in particular in January of 1981, a time at which I was employed as
the Toy Lady at Payless, that I decided the only way I'd ever get to
talk to them intelligently would be to reinvent myself as a journalist,
and the following April was so amazed by a show the JGB did at the
Phoenix Theater in Petaluma that I literally couldn't sleep until
I'd written a review of it. After showing it to a colleague at work
who wrote stuff for Soap Opera Digest, who told me yes, I could write,
I sent it off to BAM, which I read but otherwise didn't know much about,
and soon got mail back from one Blair Jackson, saying "uh, we have enough
Dead stuff for now, but wanna write something else? Call me."
In the interim I actually read some of Blair's stuff (often aloud
to co-workers while giggling hysterically at his witticisms), so
he will probably attest that I was inarticulate with terror when
I finally did call him, but he persevered and sent me off to review
David Lindley's first solo gig.
After several months he also told me to stop calling him Mr. Jackson,
dammit.
Several years of long strange trips and social engineering later,
I did indeed interview Jerry...and spent many months thereafter
wondering what I'd do with the rest of my life.:-)
The closest I can come to defining why I didn't stick it out
in rock journalism (I mean, other than the need to support myself)
had to do with not being able to sustain the necessary head-butting,
for lack of a better way to put it. Also, surrounded by people
who were really really good at it, I didn't, and don't, think I
was good enough at it to do it long-term.
But I'm honored to be in this exalted company.

I should say right away, if immodestly, that the piece of mine that ends the
book, "The Only Song of God," is my favorite piece of my own writing, that is,
the only piece of my own writing that contains a few lines that seem like real
writing <grin>. I'm tickled pink or some more psychedelic color that the essay
found a home in this wonderful book, because the venue of its original
publication, a Garcia tribute issue of Dupree's Diamond News, was even more
ephemeral than the usual fanzine ephemera, being tied up in a warehouse
somewhere as part of some lawsuit. So, thanks, guys!
That piece was written at the request of John Dwork, the editor of Dupree's.
Because Jerry had died, which felt like a huge passing-away to me of so many
things that had been centrally important to me for over 20 years, it seemed
like a speak now or forever hold your peace situation. I had already published
"Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads," but the curious form of that book,
and the fact that I was writing it with another writer, constrained me from
more rhapsodic pronouncements. This one was just for me and God's ears,
and I cried as I wrote the last parts of it. For better and worse, I won't
mind if this is what's remembered of my time here.
"Primal Dead at the Fillmore East" was written for Goldmine and the Taper's
Compendium, appearing in slightly different versions in each place, and I
frankly forget which came first. It was an elaborate excuse to ask Dick
Latvala for a copy of the long-sought-for "lost" set from 2/13/70, which
rewarded my curiosity by being not quite as sublime as the music from that
night which set the standard of Grateful Dead wonderfulness for years, but was
still damn interesting listening, if only to hear how the band, and Garcia
especially, refused to rest on the laurels of even the other set *that day*,
and pushed forward into the unknown.
More later.

My piece was written for the KPFA Folio by way of introducing myself and my
radio show, which had become part of the station's lineup in the spring of
1990.
My relationship with the Dead, and my place in that cosmos, was so weird for
so long that I was unable to write much about it for many years. I promised
KPFA a piece, though, and after much procrastination I delivered one.

"Transformative Mysteries" was written at the behest of a sweet editor at the
San Francisco Sentinel, who is now dead of AIDS, sadly. For about six months
in the mid-'80s, the Sentinel was a really interesting bohemian publication,
proto-Gen X even, attracting genius writers and photographers some of whom went
on to bigger and better things (Andrew O'Hehir, now of Salon, among them.)
The Sentinel was something nearly unimaginable: a gay San Francisco newspaper
that refused to be ghettoized, that insisted on looking beyond this week's
Miss Leather Tits contest and sex ads, to engage hip culture at large. What a
relief! It couldn't last, and didn't, bought out by some bar-owning
Neanderthal who promptly returned it to our regularly scheduled program of
"Pride" <tm>.
That essay came out of my frustration at never meeting any gay Deadheads, after
years of going to shows. I was living with a wonderful guy at the time who
managed to see the Dead open a second set at the Greek on a sunny day with
"Fire on the Mountain" and still be unimpressed. I knew my heterosexual
brothers and sisters were having peak experiences together, enraptured, falling
in love during "Stella Blue," smooching during "Morning Dew," and so on; yet,
though the Dead seemed like marvelously liberated swinging fun *to me*, and gay
people seemed to "get" tribal psychedelia if there was a disco ball dangling
over the dance floor, I was continually frustrated by the disdain with which my
Dead interests were met from the few gay people I could relate to. It was
something about fashion or lack of artifice, something about the homophobia
radiating from the Dead Zeitgeist perhaps -- I didn't care. I felt more at
home on Haight Street than I did on Castro Street. So I tried to explain it,
translate from one world of hip otherness to another.

And Steve's work, along with the article by Edward Guthmann (A Tale of Two
Tribes), are an example of another thing we hoped to accomplish with this
anthology, namely, to break down some of the stereotyping of Deadheads as
one particular type of person (white, male, hetero, and either a teenager or
an aging hippie...). Another example is the piece by Milton Mayer, "An Aged
Deadhead." Another is Paddy Ladd's article, "You Don't Seem to Hear Me When
I Call," by the noted British Deaf deadhead.

Let's see...I wrote "Deadheads: A Strange Tale of Love Devotion and
Surrender" in early '81, back when I was managing editor of BAM. I felt
like no one had ever really written anything cool about Deadheads, and
since I was one and as editor could give the subject the appropriate
space, I took it upon myself to write that cover story. It marked my
first interview with a Dead member (Mickey), though I had met Jerry at
a photo shoot for BAM in late '77. (The famously cantankerous and
assholic shutterbug Jim Marshall hit Jerry up for cocaine; Jerry
obliged!). I took all the Deadhead photos that appeared with the
original articlea pretty hideous crew it was, too. 'Course I was
afraid to go up to cute girls and ask if I could take their picture.
I've always liked that article and I was thrilled when Paul Grushkin
used the opening (about Egypt) in his (still)fine "Book of the
Deadheads" the following year.
"This Darkness Got to Give" was one of my preachy, up-on-my-high-horse
editorials from The Golden Road, mixed with some actual reporting,
about problems in the Dead scene whenever the hell that was...late
'80s? '90? I dunno. I read it the other day. Not bad. It's a slice of
history, I suppose. The writing is kind of pedestrian; not exactly
designed for future anthologies, but there it is...
"American Beauty" was a piece I wrote in a couple of weeks right after
Jerry died, at the behest of Guitar World (a magazine I'd barely even
seen) for a lot of money. It was a very strange time, to say the least.
Aside from being bombarded by media folks for the first couple of
weeks after Jerry died, I was going through a really horrific health
crisis which was severely debilitating and completely mysterious. At
one point, after days of discomfort with neck, chest and arm pain, I
checked into Kaiser's emergency room fearing I was having a heart
attack or something. I went through a zillion tests, was told I had a
fantastic heart, and then went to my wife's chiropractor, who informed
me how screwed up my neck/back was --maybe it was tension and poor
ergonomics etc. finally catching up with me, exacerbated by Jerry's
death, which I never could really absorb on a personal level because I
was so busy writing about him/it; then I plunged right into doing the
Jerry bio. Anyway, it took many weeks of chiropractic care but I was
healed 100 percent (hellelujah!). But you don't care about all this.
Anyway, the point is I was in bad shape when I wrote the article but I
did work hard on it, and I was happy to get the opportunity to write
about Jerry for an a largely non-Deadhead audience--I used the piece to
try to explicate some of what was interesting about him as a player
and bandleader, etc. I had been told it was going to be a cover story,
so imagine my surprise when I walked into a Times Square magazine shop
and found AC/DC on the cover. Hey, metal sells.
The other piece I wrote in the Reader was "The Swirl According to
Carp," which I wrote for High Frontiers (later it became Mondo 2000)
under the pseudonym Jack Brittton. (Britton is my middle name.) I just
thought it would be nice to step outside my usual persona in the Dead
world and try something a little different.
I'd like to say again, what a great job David and Diana did on the
reader. As David Gans has said, this is a project both he and I had
considered tackling (separately and together, I think) at different
times, but never quite got around to, so I had some pretty strong ideas
about what I thought it should be like. And I can honestly say it's
better than what I probably would have done given the same pool to draw
from. It belongs on every Deadhead's shelf...

What Blair said. These editors did it up right!
Steve said:
>the homophobia radiating from the Dead Zeitgeist
Can we talk about that? I'm not really aware of such a thing, but then, I'm
not really attuned to it.

Oh, my. One hardly knows where to start. But start with the assumption that
anyone you meet who looks like a hippie, who isn't a screaming femme or a butch
dyke, is straight. It's not as bad that way now -- the world has grown up a
little! especially in the Bay Area -- but back in the '70s and '80s, gay people
were one tribe of weirdos, and hippies stoners and freaks were another, and it
wasn't just that they were different tribes, but sometimes they felt actually
opposed. Especially by the late '70s and into the '80s, gay people had
developed this subculture around the urban ghettos, which was pretty bourgeois,
style-conscious, "clones," and so on, and longhairs with their shrooms and
their backpacks were like, yuck. The modern day equivalent is the culture of
the Circuit parties, which -- despite the fact that they're centered around
drugs and dancing for hours to beat-heavy "tribal" tunes -- is all about looks,
and money, and a certain kind of jaded cool. Looks, money, and jadedness play
roles among Deadheads too, but -- you get the picture.
It didn't help that the whole *vibe* around the Dead was bikerish, Peninsula
cowboy redneck, a funny kind of macho embodied in the big mustached galootitude
of, say, Steve Parish, or, more elegantly, Barlow. Despite what one heard
aboutr Weir, which I suspect was a case of universal wishful thinking, the
whole Dead trip seemed to be about a kind of cosmic no-bullshit tough
alpha-male self-sufficiency. Which is cool, in many ways. But one never had
the sense that Garcia -- even Garcia, the smart one! -- had done much
self-examination "around" homosexuality. It was probably tough enough for him
to examine his having a body at all, and all the iconic numenon fed him by
Hunter was about female muses -- not that any of this has anything to do with
homophobia plain and simple.
But hey, the vibe was accurate: there were at least two major closet cases in
the inner Dead scene, and I'm not talking about Weir -- in fact, I'm not saying
any more about that at all. But after 30 years, I find myself the most
"out" Dead-related figure, and I'm not at all an insider. That says something.
We are everywhere, but where are we?

By the way, as out as I am, I *still* got uptight at the reading when Edward
read his article about me being gay before I myself got the chance to read,
because I felt like now everyone would see my reading through the gay filter.
Right: *I'm* the one laying that trip down, but still, I definitely had the
sense that I was the only gay guy there besides my wonderful boyfriend.

>gay people had developed this subculture around the urban ghettos, which was
>pretty bourgeois, style-conscious, "clones," and so on, and longhairs with
>their shrooms and their backpacks were like, yuck
So the disdain was bidirectional.
>It didn't help that the whole *vibe* around the Dead was bikerish, Peninsula
>cowboy redneck, a funny kind of macho embodied in the big mustached
>galootitude of, say, Steve Parish, or, more elegantly, Barlow.
Backstage, maybe, but in the audience?
>there were at least two major closet cases in the inner Dead scene
That's a pretty hairy thing to assert if you're not prepared to elaborate.
What's interesting to me about this is that the Deadhead subculture seems to
be so much about acceptance, and safety.

There was at least one gay couple that was part of our extended show-
going group for many years. Both long dead of AIDS, sad to say,
but at least one of the guys had been into the Dead since the '70s.

> That's a pretty hairy thing to assert if you're not prepared to elaborate.
Well, elaborating would out them, so... that's why they call 'em "closet
cases."
There were gay and lesbian Deadheads around, always. But many of them would
decline to hold their partner's hand at shows to avoid "weirding people out."
I actually didn't meet one single out gay Deadhead until the mid-'80s, and I'd
been going since '73, and looking for them.
There was Deadophobia on the gay side, for sure.
By the way, gay Phish phans have already built themselves a sanctuary at
http://www.brianrobert.com. I suspect that as long as there's an Internet,
things will never be as bad as they were that way.

One of the cool things about this book, from what I've seen of it so
far, is that you see a lot of different subcultural facets of the
Dead scene from a lot of different perspectives. The tip of the
tie-dyed iceberg, but a start...
David and Diana, what sort of stuff got lost in the missing 400
pages? Might we see it in some hypothetical Volume 2?
And while you're at it, say more about this bibliography.

About that second volume...there is plenty of material, but, you see, every
year that David has published a book we've had a child, so NFW! because two
is my limit. One anthology is enough given that others do exist. David just
told me a fun idea for another book (feel free to steal this idea): trace
the band's touring across the country by looking at local news articles, a
kind of history through local news coverage.
One comment about the macho image: I also felt that at the shows I attended.
I'm not saying there was blatent misogamy, but I can certainly understand a
gay person feeling less than accepted. Now I'll let David (currently
barefoot and in the kitchen) answer the question about the bibliography.

The WELL® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of The Well Group,
Inc.
1195 Park Avenue, Suite 206; Emeryville, CA 94608 | (415) 343-5731 | Email
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service